You're right. "Free speech" means the freedom to talk to whoever you want, about whatever you want, whenever you want, as often as you want, by whatever medium you want, as long as the person doesn't tell you to go away.
I fail to see where any of what you said implies that telemarketers force you to listen. This is the same argument used by the radio censors. Howard Stern forces my kids to listen to fart noises. It's nonsense.
However, a law based on the opt-in standard (telemarketers can only call people who have put their name on a "DO CALL" list) would be perfectly constitutional (and IMO preferable).
I don't think that would be constitutional. I think it would be too much of a hinderance on free speech. It would be like saying that no cable television show could have nudity unless all the subscribers put their name on a "WANT NUDITY" list.
I think the do not call list is a great start - it dosent hurt telemarketers because guess what? If I want to get on the list I clearly dont want to hear from them, thus Im not a good prospect.
Usually the telemarketing company is not the same company that is selling the product. They might make money off commission, but when the number of calls they make goes down, you can bet that this will cause downward pressure on commissions. It'll be good for the company selling the product, but it won't be good for the company doing the telemarketing.
The fact of the matter is you're still exaggerating your point. Telemarketers don't force you to pick up the phone. They don't even force you to have a phone in the first place.
I do support these laws, because I think freedom of speech has to be balanced against the right to be free from harassment, especially harassment in one's own home. The key, in my opinion, is that people have to explicitly request to be on the no-call list. If Congress had passed a law saying that all telemarketing was illegal, or even all unsolicited telemarketing, that would infringe on free speech, in my opinion.
Total coverage, from 6 different networks' news shows? Under a minute. For an event that could well have a major impact on humanity for generations to come. Not even 60 whole seconds of air time. Compare this to Lindberg's landing, and the hullabaloo that caused.
Lindbergh did something much more new than this event. This flight was what, the third of its kind by this very group, and has already been done by the government decades ago. It's cool and all, kudos to the team that made it happen, but it's a rather small step for mankind (and depending if you'd prefer the government or large corporations controlling space flight arguably a step backward).
Oh boy, rich people might get to go to Mars some day. Maybe I'll be lucky enough to get a job as an indentured servant on one of their flights.
Hey, thanks, I'll probably give them a try. I've used a virtual dedicated server before, but I was paying about $80/month for it so it had to go.
And yeah, I knew about there being no such thing as "unlimited traffic". That's why I'm so skeptical about any place which makes that claim. If it were rate limited to 1Mbit that'd probably be fine, but more often I've found that their terms of service don't allow hosting of large databases and they'll shut me off long before I get to that 50 gig/month transfer that this place limits you to.
Anyway, I should give them a try for a month. $25 isn't too much to waste if they suck, and I'll keep my hostname dynamic for that month so if they go down I can easily switch.
One thing is to hide an email that, theoretically will never be revealed and is known to absolutely anyone but me (and a trusted party, in this case, slashdot).
And anyone else who monitored an unencrypted connection, and the email provider itself, and anyone who manages to hack into slashdot or yoyur slashdot account, and anyone who looked over your shoulder when you created the account, and anyone with access to a computer you used to log in...
This is not obscurity, but rather, impossibility. It is theoretically impossible for you, or anyone else (in principle) to find out the address.
Right... Cause finding out top secret military information is easy, and figuring out an email address, now that's impossible!
In the case mentioned, at least one other party knows about the details of the deeds the documents are trying to hide, and it may be pointless to try to hide this information.
It may be, but it may not be, and the government is saying it isn't.
So, for instance, you may be trying to hide the fact that the US had a deal with someone who's an enemy of a current ally, but in this case, *that* person knows that and can certainly use it against you.
Of course it may not be in the best interests of that country to use the information. In fact, maybe it can't be used against us, maybe it can only be used against them.
Is security through obscurity completely worthless in certain situations? Sure. Should it ever be used as the sole method to protect something important? Of course not. But is it useful, in certain situations, to hide information from the public? Without a doubt. This isn't even really what is meant by the term "security through obscurity".
It's a serious mistake to reveal an email address if you have any strongly held opinions.
Perhaps I needed to be more explicit. This is "security through obscurity", which the above poster claims "rarely works, as malfeasants usually have other means of gaining access to the information." I was attempting to point out the hypocrisy of the poster.
Good 'n old Security by Obscurity, aka "National Security". It leaves us all with that warm feeling that nothing is going to happen. Unfortunately, it rarely works, as malfeasants usually have other means of gaining access to the information.
I notice you don't have your email address listed. Is there a reason for that?
The FBI argued that releasing the last ten pages would pose a risk to national security as a foreign government (not identified) secretly gave information to the US Government. Looks like another big step in the Freedom of Information Act.
Hopefully not a big step backward in national security, though.
A better system that leaves more freedom for the user might be to say that all attachment types are legal, but if a message's total length exceeds 10MB, then attachments in it will be "flagged for deletion", starting with the largest attachment in the message first, until the number is under 10MB. These larger "flagged for deletion" attachments get forceably deleted from your email archives after 24 hours, or 3 days, or something of that nature.
I would guess that google spends much more on bandwidth than it does on hard drive space. It costs about $0.05 to transfer a gig of data. For that cost you could store the data for 90 days (given a 5 year hard drive life).
And remember, google makes money based on the number of ads you view, which is related to the number of emails you read, not the size of those emails. Limiting attachment size is quite directly in google's best interest.
The search is nice, and it's much faster than searching my local hard drive. The "folders" concept is good, but it doesn't work right. The ads are rather non-intrusive, but POP/IMAP would be better. The autothreading is good in concept, but it doesn't work right all the time.
In the end, the space is the reason I use gmail as my main email account. If hotmail ever upgrades my account to 250 megs I'll probably switch back to them, because at least I can access it using outlook express and hotmail popper. Alternatively, maybe gmail will fix the problems I'm experiencing. It is beta, after all.
It's a little bit ahead of its time, but not that much. It's already quite reasonable to send decent quality photos through email. With 1000 of these photos you've already filled up 1 gig. Now take it a step further, and what about sending full videos via email? Sure, it's rare now, but given 500 meg attachment limits and 100 gig email accounts, I'm sure it'll be commonplace in the future. On my 128K DSL connection I can send a 100 meg video in under 2 hours. That's reasonable enough that I'd do it if I had the tools. Hopefully this email site has a "resume upload" feature.
If someone wants your address bad enough, they're not going to stop at whois.
Heh, it took the FBI about a year to find me back in 96 (some idiot was running a vigilante justice site on my webhosting site and apparently was sending threatening letters through the USPS, eventually they were able to trace me through my New York license which they got after finding my New Jersey address on whois and then tracing that to my New York address, finally they called me one day and asked for the contact information of the vigilante, whose site I had already blocked long ago, and I gave them the name that was listed commenting that it was probably fake). So yeah, it's possible, but it's pretty damn hard. Even harder now that I'm living with someone and the lease is in her name. You'd probably have to figure out her name first, at least if you wanted to use public records.
The description of what I require is a description of what I'm currently doing on my DSL connection. Upload speed is only one factor. Disk space and ability to download lots of data are other factors. Some people, including myself, need lots of disk space, download gigs of data a week, but don't need more than 128K up.
at the risk of getting flamed, there are alot of hosting solutions that are like a few dollars a month, and will give you php/mysql/cgi, etc.
Yeah but will they host my 2 gig mysql database (plus a couple gigs of text files which sit around while I'm importing them into the database)? Do they have the beta version of mysql running, complete with GIS support? Is the traffic really unlimited, or will they shut things off when I transfer over 10 gigs a week? Do they use ntpd, or do I have to rewrite my php scripts to sync things up properly? Will they get pissed when I run a job which takes 10 hours and pounds the database the whole time?
If you know of a place that can do all of this, and is under $40/month, I'll probably take it. I'm not even doing that much with my machine, but a hosting solution short of a dedicated server isn't really a solution.
The PO box might not be a bad idea, but if you're outside the US you won't really need that (I get one snailmailspam per owned domain per year nowadays).
Assuming the only reason you want the PO box is to stop junk mail. Personally I don't want any random slashdotter finding out my address.
So you're suggesting not only giving a real email address, but actually reading the email which goes to it? That's just ludicrous.
Personally I give my real name and an efax phone number where you can leave me voice mail. Everything else is fake. Well, the email address isn't "fake". It just forwards to/dev/null.
Not sure what you mean about only working on 1 computer. Or "not security conscious" for that matter. I think the benefits are obvious. You can actually get a copy of your email on your computer without using copy/paste. You can change your from address. Filters are much more powerful and actually work. Now that they give 250 megs of space, I see no reason *not* to use hotmail and OE. Other than the fact that it's a Microsoft product, I guess.
And if you really hate OE, there's always hotmail popper, which lets you use any POP email client.
Slashdot Mirror
You're right. "Free speech" means the freedom to talk to whoever you want, about whatever you want, whenever you want, as often as you want, by whatever medium you want, as long as the person doesn't tell you to go away.
I fail to see where any of what you said implies that telemarketers force you to listen. This is the same argument used by the radio censors. Howard Stern forces my kids to listen to fart noises. It's nonsense.
However, a law based on the opt-in standard (telemarketers can only call people who have put their name on a "DO CALL" list) would be perfectly constitutional (and IMO preferable).
I don't think that would be constitutional. I think it would be too much of a hinderance on free speech. It would be like saying that no cable television show could have nudity unless all the subscribers put their name on a "WANT NUDITY" list.
The only way I know whether a call is legitimate or a telemarketer is by answering it.
You should get caller ID. Either way, not knowing whether a call is legitimate or not still doesn't force you to answer it.
If I accept your argument, I might as well turn my ringer off, which kind of defeats half the purpose of having a phone.
At least you still have the other half.
And secondly, you obviously do NOT believe in your argument because you refuse to give me your home phone number.
I don't think you understand what my argument is. I've never argued that everyone should give their phone number to anyone who asks for it.
You can't have it both ways. If telemarketers have the right to call me, then I have the right to call you.
I never said telemarketers have the right to call you. Read my post again.
Either give me your phone number or shut up.
Read my post again. Then you'll see that you're the one who should shut up.
I think the do not call list is a great start - it dosent hurt telemarketers because guess what? If I want to get on the list I clearly dont want to hear from them, thus Im not a good prospect.
Usually the telemarketing company is not the same company that is selling the product. They might make money off commission, but when the number of calls they make goes down, you can bet that this will cause downward pressure on commissions. It'll be good for the company selling the product, but it won't be good for the company doing the telemarketing.
I do support these laws, because I think freedom of speech has to be balanced against the right to be free from harassment, especially harassment in one's own home. The key, in my opinion, is that people have to explicitly request to be on the no-call list. If Congress had passed a law saying that all telemarketing was illegal, or even all unsolicited telemarketing, that would infringe on free speech, in my opinion.
Total coverage, from 6 different networks' news shows? Under a minute. For an event that could well have a major impact on humanity for generations to come. Not even 60 whole seconds of air time. Compare this to Lindberg's landing, and the hullabaloo that caused.
Lindbergh did something much more new than this event. This flight was what, the third of its kind by this very group, and has already been done by the government decades ago. It's cool and all, kudos to the team that made it happen, but it's a rather small step for mankind (and depending if you'd prefer the government or large corporations controlling space flight arguably a step backward).
Oh boy, rich people might get to go to Mars some day. Maybe I'll be lucky enough to get a job as an indentured servant on one of their flights.
And yeah, I knew about there being no such thing as "unlimited traffic". That's why I'm so skeptical about any place which makes that claim. If it were rate limited to 1Mbit that'd probably be fine, but more often I've found that their terms of service don't allow hosting of large databases and they'll shut me off long before I get to that 50 gig/month transfer that this place limits you to.
Anyway, I should give them a try for a month. $25 isn't too much to waste if they suck, and I'll keep my hostname dynamic for that month so if they go down I can easily switch.
One thing is to hide an email that, theoretically will never be revealed and is known to absolutely anyone but me (and a trusted party, in this case, slashdot).
And anyone else who monitored an unencrypted connection, and the email provider itself, and anyone who manages to hack into slashdot or yoyur slashdot account, and anyone who looked over your shoulder when you created the account, and anyone with access to a computer you used to log in...
This is not obscurity, but rather, impossibility. It is theoretically impossible for you, or anyone else (in principle) to find out the address.
Right... Cause finding out top secret military information is easy, and figuring out an email address, now that's impossible!
In the case mentioned, at least one other party knows about the details of the deeds the documents are trying to hide, and it may be pointless to try to hide this information.
It may be, but it may not be, and the government is saying it isn't.
So, for instance, you may be trying to hide the fact that the US had a deal with someone who's an enemy of a current ally, but in this case, *that* person knows that and can certainly use it against you.
Of course it may not be in the best interests of that country to use the information. In fact, maybe it can't be used against us, maybe it can only be used against them.
Is security through obscurity completely worthless in certain situations? Sure. Should it ever be used as the sole method to protect something important? Of course not. But is it useful, in certain situations, to hide information from the public? Without a doubt. This isn't even really what is meant by the term "security through obscurity".
It's a serious mistake to reveal an email address if you have any strongly held opinions.
Perhaps I needed to be more explicit. This is "security through obscurity", which the above poster claims "rarely works, as malfeasants usually have other means of gaining access to the information." I was attempting to point out the hypocrisy of the poster.
Good 'n old Security by Obscurity, aka "National Security". It leaves us all with that warm feeling that nothing is going to happen. Unfortunately, it rarely works, as malfeasants usually have other means of gaining access to the information.
I notice you don't have your email address listed. Is there a reason for that?
The FBI argued that releasing the last ten pages would pose a risk to national security as a foreign government (not identified) secretly gave information to the US Government. Looks like another big step in the Freedom of Information Act.
Hopefully not a big step backward in national security, though.
A better system that leaves more freedom for the user might be to say that all attachment types are legal, but if a message's total length exceeds 10MB, then attachments in it will be "flagged for deletion", starting with the largest attachment in the message first, until the number is under 10MB. These larger "flagged for deletion" attachments get forceably deleted from your email archives after 24 hours, or 3 days, or something of that nature.
I would guess that google spends much more on bandwidth than it does on hard drive space. It costs about $0.05 to transfer a gig of data. For that cost you could store the data for 90 days (given a 5 year hard drive life).
And remember, google makes money based on the number of ads you view, which is related to the number of emails you read, not the size of those emails. Limiting attachment size is quite directly in google's best interest.
The search is nice, and it's much faster than searching my local hard drive. The "folders" concept is good, but it doesn't work right. The ads are rather non-intrusive, but POP/IMAP would be better. The autothreading is good in concept, but it doesn't work right all the time.
In the end, the space is the reason I use gmail as my main email account. If hotmail ever upgrades my account to 250 megs I'll probably switch back to them, because at least I can access it using outlook express and hotmail popper. Alternatively, maybe gmail will fix the problems I'm experiencing. It is beta, after all.
It's a little bit ahead of its time, but not that much. It's already quite reasonable to send decent quality photos through email. With 1000 of these photos you've already filled up 1 gig. Now take it a step further, and what about sending full videos via email? Sure, it's rare now, but given 500 meg attachment limits and 100 gig email accounts, I'm sure it'll be commonplace in the future. On my 128K DSL connection I can send a 100 meg video in under 2 hours. That's reasonable enough that I'd do it if I had the tools. Hopefully this email site has a "resume upload" feature.
Would you really make more use of 100 GB than 1 GB?
Since they allow 500 meg attachments, yes, I would. I could back up my hard drives by sending myself emails, for instance.
Well, I probably hadn't yet filed a tax return for my New York address. I've moved something like 6 times in the last 7 years.
If someone wants your address bad enough, they're not going to stop at whois.
Heh, it took the FBI about a year to find me back in 96 (some idiot was running a vigilante justice site on my webhosting site and apparently was sending threatening letters through the USPS, eventually they were able to trace me through my New York license which they got after finding my New Jersey address on whois and then tracing that to my New York address, finally they called me one day and asked for the contact information of the vigilante, whose site I had already blocked long ago, and I gave them the name that was listed commenting that it was probably fake). So yeah, it's possible, but it's pretty damn hard. Even harder now that I'm living with someone and the lease is in her name. You'd probably have to figure out her name first, at least if you wanted to use public records.
you can't do any serious hosting with 128k up.
The description of what I require is a description of what I'm currently doing on my DSL connection. Upload speed is only one factor. Disk space and ability to download lots of data are other factors. Some people, including myself, need lots of disk space, download gigs of data a week, but don't need more than 128K up.
at the risk of getting flamed, there are alot of hosting solutions that are like a few dollars a month, and will give you php/mysql/cgi, etc.
Yeah but will they host my 2 gig mysql database (plus a couple gigs of text files which sit around while I'm importing them into the database)? Do they have the beta version of mysql running, complete with GIS support? Is the traffic really unlimited, or will they shut things off when I transfer over 10 gigs a week? Do they use ntpd, or do I have to rewrite my php scripts to sync things up properly? Will they get pissed when I run a job which takes 10 hours and pounds the database the whole time?
If you know of a place that can do all of this, and is under $40/month, I'll probably take it. I'm not even doing that much with my machine, but a hosting solution short of a dedicated server isn't really a solution.
The PO box might not be a bad idea, but if you're outside the US you won't really need that (I get one snailmailspam per owned domain per year nowadays).
Assuming the only reason you want the PO box is to stop junk mail. Personally I don't want any random slashdotter finding out my address.
Sometimes people really do need to contact you.
So you're suggesting not only giving a real email address, but actually reading the email which goes to it? That's just ludicrous.
Personally I give my real name and an efax phone number where you can leave me voice mail. Everything else is fake. Well, the email address isn't "fake". It just forwards to /dev/null.
And if you really hate OE, there's always hotmail popper, which lets you use any POP email client.
Or switch to Outlook Express for accessing your hotmail account. Fast working, no advertisements, and keyboard shortcuts.
If everyone calls it that, then it's not incorrect. Words are defined by usage, after all.